My useful BH links"Friends: the Fambly we choose" ~Shared pain is diminished, shared joy is increased
inanimate objects are smarter than we give them credit for~our lives are too short to not help others~when you find a big kettle of crazy, it's best not to stir it Dilbert 9/22/09~ making no decision is really making the choice to do nothing, about something~organic spell-checker is nearly perfect, but sometimes, it just doesn't care.Lord, let me be the kind of person my cat (or dog) thinks I am.

Nothing funny about it sadly. This place is forgotten, or should I say dead... Once in a great while, an admin of TechTarget might have a sudden awakening and remember this site and forum exist. It has been months since their last visit or contribution. The last 'Headline News' from them was in Feb/March? Who is paying the light bill? Pathetic.

My useful BH links"Friends: the Fambly we choose" ~Shared pain is diminished, shared joy is increased
inanimate objects are smarter than we give them credit for~our lives are too short to not help others~when you find a big kettle of crazy, it's best not to stir it Dilbert 9/22/09~ making no decision is really making the choice to do nothing, about something~organic spell-checker is nearly perfect, but sometimes, it just doesn't care.Lord, let me be the kind of person my cat (or dog) thinks I am.

CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appearedMicrosoft, Cisco, and VMWare among those infected with additional mystery payload.

The recent CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it initially appeared, according to newly unearthed evidence. That evidence shows that the CCleaner malware infected at least 20 computers from a carefully selected list of high-profile technology companies with a mysterious payload.

Talos
Previously, researchers found no evidence that any of the computers infected by the booby-trapped version of the widely used CCleaner utility had received a second-stage payload the backdoor was capable of delivering. The new evidence—culled from data left on a command-and-control server during the last four days attackers operated it—shows otherwise. Of 700,000 infected PCs, 20 of them, belonging to highly targeted companies, received the second stage, according to an analysis published Wednesday by Cisco Systems' Talos Group.
Because the CCleaner backdoor was active for 31 days, the total number of infected computers is "likely at least in the order of hundreds," researchers from Avast, the antivirus company that acquired CCleaner in July, said in their own analysis published Thursday.

From September 12 to September 16, the highly advanced second stage was reserved for computers inside 20 companies or Web properties, including Cisco, Microsoft, Gmail, VMware, Akamai, Sony, and Samsung. The 20 computers that installed the payload were from eight of those targeted organizations, Avast said, without identifying which ones. Again, because the data covers only a small fraction of the time the backdoor was active, both Avast and Talos believe the true number of targets and victims was much bigger.

More fileless malware
The second stage appears to use a completely different control network. The complex code is heavily obfuscated and uses anti-debugging and anti-emulation tricks to conceal its inner workings. Craig Williams, a senior technology leader and global outreach manager at Talos, said the code contains a "fileless" third stage that's injected into computer memory without ever being written to disk, a feature that further makes analysis difficult. Researchers are in the process of reverse engineering the payload to understand precisely what it does on infected networks.

"When you look at this software package, it's very well developed," Williams told Ars. "This is someone who spent a lot of money with a lot of developers perfecting it. It's clear that whoever made this has used it before and is likely going to use it again."

My useful BH links"Friends: the Fambly we choose" ~Shared pain is diminished, shared joy is increased
inanimate objects are smarter than we give them credit for~our lives are too short to not help others~when you find a big kettle of crazy, it's best not to stir it Dilbert 9/22/09~ making no decision is really making the choice to do nothing, about something~organic spell-checker is nearly perfect, but sometimes, it just doesn't care.Lord, let me be the kind of person my cat (or dog) thinks I am.